Dave Winer

If you're developing web apps, you're nuts if you aren't using Font Awesome. Seriously.

Wed, 22 May 2013 00:35:45 GMT

Our users love icons.

I guess most users do, but people who write in outliners need a little more graphic relief because our work is totally text and structure. Adding a bit of graphics is like adding spice to a sauce. And they're fun!

We're lucky because Font Awesome is such a great collection of icons. And it keeps getting better. If you're developing web apps, you're nuts if you aren't using Font Awesome. Seriously.

Anyway, until Fargo 0.65 it was a lot of work to add an icon to an outline. What changed is that we created an icon chooser dialog that makes it easy and fun.

If you're using Fargo, you can try it out with the Icon Chooser command in the Outliner menu.

If you're not using Fargo, here's a little demo app you can try. It doesn't do much but allow you to browse the icons. When you click on one, an alert pops up saying which icon you chose.

If you're a programmer, the code is free to use under the GPL. That means any improvements you make must also be licensed under the GPL. And it would be nice if you said where you got it. :-)

https://github.com/scripting/Icon-Chooser

Enjoy!

Scripting News: Hacker News is depressing.

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:00:13 GMT

Yesterday someone at Hacker News thought to point to my piece about Marissa Mayer. It was a story I wrote in about 15 minutes. The point was at the end of the piece. As a preamble, I told a couple of stories from my personal experience. I figured it would get a few comments, maybe a couple of thousand reads, and that would be that. But the torrent of abuse on Hacker News was something that I haven't seen in a long time.

One of the main reasons it doesn't work is that people don't ask questions to clarify. They jump to conclusions, some of which are very wrong. For example, they assumed I was the only person who was concerned about the BlogThis! button. Not true.

They assumed that I was being "egotistical" for thinking that Google ever cared what I thought, and arrogant that I think they should care what I think now. It's a fact that at one point, early-on, Google did care. Their chief PR person was from Apple, Cindy McCaffrey, a class act in every way. She would routinely send emails to me and Doc Searls asking our opinions. Whether anyone else there cared, I don't know. But I was invited to a meeting with engineers to talk about blogging, RSS and XML-RPC at one point. I can't imagine why they would ask me to tell them what I think if they didn't care. I suppose it might have been a big conspiracy, like Mission Impossible. Hey I wouldn't put it past some of the trolls on Hacker News to argue that. :-)

On the other hand, I don't take it personally that Google doesn't care what I think these days, partially because I don't think they care what anyone thinks. That's a long story all by itself.

Now, we could have had an interesting discussion on HN if people would have asked questions for clarification instead of just piling on the abuse based on their impressions. That's taking them at face-value, assuming they really want an informative discussion. Probably the trolls in the thread, and their upvoters, wanted nothing like that.

There were some other ludicrous statements. Did any of them know that I started a new company in December, and we shipped our first two products in March and April? They said I thought JavaScript was a bad language. How funny, because I'm writing almost all my code these days in JavaScript. They say I'm old and out of date. Funny. They're the ones who are out of date! :-)

And if you say someone's old as a way of hurting them, the joke will eventually come back to hurt you. As one of the characters of Citizen Kane, Bernstein, said so eloquently, old age is the one disease you don't look forward to being cured of. It comes to everyone. I was young once. Now I'm middle-aged. Truth. And the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. I don't see what it has to do with the point of my blog post.

Now I think there's a solution to letting the assholes control the conversation...

As discourse has moved to Twitter, its big contribution has been to push aside the abuse that's common with discussion boards and mail lists. A very simple feature in Twitter, the block command, enforces decorum, by empowering the listener to turn you off if they find you offensive. People learn that if they say abusive things, they don't have to listen. The only people I listen to on Twitter are those who can make a point without getting personal. I learn from disagreement, but I can't stand people who use their freedom to speak as a way of hurting others.

Then I wondered -- if it works so well for Twitter -- why can't sites block Hacker News if the abuse gets too heavy? After yesterday's experience I probably would do it. I like the flow they deliver, but I hate the abuse.

So I have a suggestion for Paul Graham, the guy who runs Hacker News. Give sites the option of blocking links from Hacker News. I honestly don't care what the HN trolls, and the people who upvote them, supposedly "think" about me. None of it is based on anything real. A lot of it is anonymous. Sometimes people create accounts just for the purpose of dropping a big smelly turd in the middle of a discussion.

Let's learn a trick from Twitter, and cut off the trolls at the source.

PS: I subscribe to the Hacker News feed, which does not include comments. It's very useful stuff. So the links themselves are good.

Scripting News: I tried Google Glass.

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:25:11 GMT

I went to dinner last night with the two Scobles, Robert and Patrick.

Robert is famous for the picture of him wearing a Google Glass while in the shower.

Last night, he was wearing the glasses most of the dinner, but took them off. He said I should try them. I did.

What you get is a sequence of cards, with recent tweets, emails, Google Now type stuff. You scroll through them by swiping on the stem of the glasses. It doesn't any time to get the hang of it.

You can create tweets with voice. It happened so quickly I barely knew I had done it. I created a tweet on Scoble's account. It contained an expletive which they conveniently ***'ed out for me.

It was nice. However I don't feel any lust for having one of my own. I carry an Android phone and an iPad with me most places. The UI of Google Glass, while interesting, doesn't seem to be an improvement over the phone interface.

But it's early days. Maybe someone will figure this out. The Apple II wasn't much use before Visicalc, for example. The Mac came with a couple of demo apps, but didn't blossom until there were 20 or 30 useful pieces of software for it (it needed more of an ecosystem than an individual killer app).

Scripting News: My one talk with Marissa Mayer.

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:08:14 GMT

It was 2003. Google had just bought Blogger. On the acquisition, they said they wouldn't do anything to tilt the table in favor of Blogger. There was concern in the wider blogging community that Google might use its power in search to give people an incentive to use Blogger over other publishing platforms. They said this would never happen.

But a few weeks after the deal they broke the promise. They added a BlogThis! button to Google Toolbar. It only worked with Blogger. It would have been a simple matter to make it work with any blogging tool. But they didn't see why they should do that.

It would have been okay if Blogger was the default. But give the users a preference to set the address of our blogging platform.

Back then Google cared a little about what I thought, so the result was a conference call between me and an exec at Google, Marissa Mayer. I was driving cross-country from California to Boston, so I stopped in Utah, in the parking lot of a 7-11 just east of Salt Lake City, and we had the call.

All I remember of it was there came a point in the conversation when Mayer had had enough. She just got up and left. I think the people remaining in the conference room were a little embarassed. Google didn't do anything to change the BlogThis! button.

All this is to say that the promises execs make on acquisitions are meaningless. They own the thing, they will do what they want to with it. It doesn't matter how many nice sounds Mayer makes on the deal. At the core she cares not one bit what the users of Tumblr think. She's saying what she needs to say to make the deal happen. To avoid a PR crisis on Day One. To make the team at Tumblr feel like their work has value to the new owners. That somehow this acquisition isn't actually an acquisition.

I have some intuition about this myself, because I sold a company. We were bought because we had a presence in the Mac market, which was highly coveted at the time. I negotiated for myself a role as the "Chief architect of Symantec's Mac strategy." A few weeks after the deal I made a presentation to the exec staff about what our Mac strategy would be. Only one person showed up, the president of the company, Gordon Eubanks. He watched a couple of slides and thanked me for the input. I asked What about my chief architect role? He told me that was something they told me to get me to do the deal.

He left the room. What was I going to do? What could I do? Nothing, that's what. :-)

Moral of the story: When you sell your company, no matter what promises were made, you sold it. It's theirs now. They will do what they want to with it. Promises don't matter.

Scripting News: Google is the new MSM.

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:50:59 GMT

Last night watching the NBA on TNT, new commercials for the YouTube comedy fest. The production was distinctly not YouTube. It was professional in every way. Nothing amateur about it. Google is now MSM. All that talk about Burning Man is sleight of hand. That guy has as much in common with you and me as Rupert Murdoch does.

It's not just Google, Twitter is also MSM. Facebook? Eh. Their presence on TV is mostly in URLs at the bottom of other peoples' ads. Their commercials are amateurish, awful imitations of other tech company commercials. Not to say they're the only ones with awful commercials, but theirs are awful in their amateurishness.

A blog post on Forbes suggests that Google is going to bring RSS back in a MSM-type way. You'll be able to follow Blogger blogs in Google Plus. Maybe they'll make a deal with Automattic and Tumblr to make it possible to follow their blogs too. Me and you? Well we can be followed, but only if we use one of the silos. We have to be locked in someone's trunk to participate.

The web is going to play the same role to all this crazy locked up stuff that it played to MSM in the 90s. We're going to be the oddballs. The ones with amateurish sites. We'll be the artisans, the local farmers of ideas. The ones that lack polish but speak from our experience. We'll do what Bulworth so famously did. I don't have access, and I don't want it. I'd much prefer to hear from other people who don't have access and don't want it.

The web keeps moving. If your attention has shifted and you can't see that, that's not the same thing as the web being lost. Maybe you got lost? :-)

Scripting News: Why Dave Wynn uses Fargo.

Thu, 16 May 2013 16:01:38 GMT

Scripting News: What's new (or broken) with the Twitter API?

Wed, 15 May 2013 13:39:14 GMT

My linkblogging tool, Radio2, has a connection with Twitter. You can establish a link between your feed and Twitter so that every item in your feed is also posted to Twitter.

Here's a screen shot. To create the connection you click on the blue bird. That starts an OAuth conversation where the user gives Radio2 permission to post to his or her Twitter account.

I've been hearing, peripherally, that some part of the old Twitter API is about to be turned off, or maybe has already been turned off. I can't pay full attention because it's a small feature, used by just a few people, and I have my attention elsewhere.

Late last night I tried clicking on the blue bird, and sure enough there appears to be some breakage. Twitter complains that there is "no request token for this page." Perhaps they changed something in their OAuth implementation?

I should investigate.

If you have any clues, please post a comment.

Thanks! :-)

Scripting News: We need a curator for the Apple river.

Sat, 11 May 2013 23:16:26 GMT

I did a house-cleaning on my river server on May 9. At that time some of the rivers stopped updating. Mostly the ones that no longer have tabs in the user interface because either I personally didn't have enough interest in the subject and not many other people were reading them. I didn't feel like paying for machine resources if only one or two people were reading the flow, or if there were only one or two new items a week.

One of the rivers that I turned off is the Apple river. I use a Mac, several in fact. And I have an iPad and an iPod. I am a long-time Apple shareholder. I am an Apple user, but I am not a dedicated member of the Apple community like some people I respect are. For example, Brent Simmons, Marco Arment, John Gruber, Daniel Jalkut or Michael Gartenberg. I see a tremendous value in the river, if only someone rooted in the community would take an interest. It's also a potential money-maker, imho.

It's really time for communities to spread out and become more inclusive. With a well-curated river, the Mac community can explore more niches, and grow in some interesting ways, perhaps.

So I offer to keep running the river...

1. If someone with a site with serious flow offers to display the river on their site, linked to from their home page.

2. It can be rendered in their template.

3. I will provide support on the technical process for getting the river to display well in another site. It involves using jQuery, something I'm not an expert in. But I got it to work here, so I presume we can get it working anywhere. If we need help I know where to ask for it. ;-)

4. The curator has to have the ability to edit an OPML subscription list, and make it available at a public HTTP address. Fargo, my outliner, does this very nicely, in conjunction with Dropbox. But you can use any tool you like.

5. The person doing the curating and the person doing the display can be different people, if you like.

6. Curating here means choosing feeds, not stories. We're looking for good sources of Mac news and opinion. But it's up to those sources to decide what goes in the river. It's just an RSS aggregator on the back-end.

7. All I want in return is a link from the page back to a page that shows people how to set up their own rivers, which I will write. It won't be hype-ish. I may ask for a little money for the software.

I think the Apple river is a great place to start. Now I'm looking for one of the leaders in the Mac blogging world to step up and work with me on this. I may not be a Mac insider these days, but I go back to the beginning. I was onstage at the Mac rollout in 1984. I had an ad in the first issue of MacWorld. My product won the top Eddy in 1986. I used to go to WWDC back when it was in San Jose. I even spoke at WWDC one year. Ask Guy Kawasaki. ;-)

Let's do this. I think it'll turn out to be an important step in the growth of the Mac blogosphere.

Scripting News: Should the Community Feed be an RSS feed in addition to being an OPML feed?

Sat, 11 May 2013 03:41:59 GMT

This question came up in the Community Feed, which you can read in Fargo, by choosing the Community Feed command from the Docs menu. Or you can read it in the Small Picture Reader if you don't use Fargo. I wrote my answer there, but thought it would be interesting to also post it here. No I didn't use the fancy Blogging 2.0 protocol I described in an earlier post. Soooon!

Well of course it would be nice to have everything, if there were no cost.

It would take time to write the code and keep it running. It would be worth doing if there would be a lot of people using it. But right now the Community Feed a new feature. We're still at the point where we're introducing ourselves. If that's all it does it will have been worth it.

I'm an investor in software, and I have to make decisions as any investor would. I can't buy everything. And right now there are other projects that I think need more attention.

Also, and this is a key point, this is not something you need Kyle or me to do. The OPML feed is public. If you want to write the code to convert it to an RSS feed, you can do it.

Read it once every ten minutes. Use the eTag feature of HTTP to conserve bandwidth. Generate RSS 2.0. How will you synthesize a title for each item? I don't know, that's a hard problem. RSS 2.0 doesn't require titles, but Google Reader did. That made generating RSS feeds a difficult process for data that doesn't inherently have titles. But Google Reader is going away, so we're free to do as we please, you say. Not so fast. The replacements are clones. I bet they're just as picky as GR was. At least until the dust settles, and that isn't going to happen this year even, probably.

But OPML feeds? Ahhh that's easy. Since I'm writing both ends I can make it work. And if I want to change things based on what I learn, I can do that too. That's why the early days on anything are important. And why you should go slowly enough so you can feed back what you learn into the protocol.

Anyway you see these questions sound simple, but when you actually start writing the code, they can become complex.

Bottom-line: My bet is that no one would use an RSS feed of this content. That makes it a bad investment. I've been wrong before, btw.

Scripting News: Blogging 2.0.

Thu, 09 May 2013 18:29:19 GMT

Georgia
160%

I wrote a piece in August 2012 which I posted on Medium entitled We Could Make History, in which I proposed that we get together and create a new API to connect authoring tools to publishing environments.

At the time I thought it was a long shot, but worth putting it out there in case anyone was listening at Medium, or elsewhere. That's why I made it openly. And why I put the post on Medium.

Today I'm writing this post on my own blogging platform, which is more or less some scaffolding I put together to hook my outliner up to the web, so I could publish, before we had something real that others could use.

Now I can make a more concrete proposal because Fargo is visible, people can better imagine what I'm talking about.

1. I don't like the idea of writing something to have it visible in only one place.

2. Sometimes I find that a comment I wrote in one place is really a blog post, but why should it stop being a comment?

3. Copy/paste is an awful synch protocol. It's 2013. We can do better! In fact we live in a time of great progress in sychronization, thanks to Dropbox. Publishing should make the leap into the future as well.

4. Software now runs in the browser, written in JavaScript. It's indistinguishable from desktop software. So any protocol we come up with must work equally well with JS apps running in the browser.

5. Meanwhile there are a number of projects underway to bring blogging up to date. But they're doing it without APIs and without feeds. Why? That's not really progress.

6. We were able to hook up Fargo to WordPress, largely to show what's possible. But we had to set up a proxy server so that our JS app running in the browser could call their server. This is a waste of resources and does not scale.

7. We will have a for-real CMS running on a server. It will do things that are new, that none of the other publishing platforms do. But there will still be things they do that we don't. APIs are needed. But I'd prefer to work with others to come up with the API, rather than do both ends myself. If we do it that way we get there sooner, better.

8. I'm pretty sure there will be APIs here. But I'd rather there just be one. We had that worked out pretty well in Blogging 1.0. But let's do it even better in 2.0.

9. Who wants to go first? :-)

Video: Demo of new Community Feed feature in Fargo 0.59.

Wed, 08 May 2013 19:23:21 GMT

More about Fargo 0.59.

Scripting News: Levy on BigCo innovation.

Tue, 07 May 2013 22:03:16 GMT

Levy: "To really think big, you can't be at a big company."

I was amazed that these words came from Steven Levy, former Newsweek tech reporter, and late of Wired. He's spent a career supporting the myth not just that big ideas can come from big companies, but that they only come from big companies.

He was paraphrasing Evan Williams, founder of Twitter and Blogger. But it's still an amazing transformation.

Now, I don't expect the press to all of a sudden start reporting on where big ideas actually come from. But it's nice to be able to point to the truth, just once, from such a source.

BTW, we're thinking very big at Small Picture. :-)

Scripting News: Q&A with Brent Simmons re River of News.

Tue, 07 May 2013 16:49:58 GMT

Palatino

On April 11, Brent Simmons sent an email, included below. My words are indented beneath his in italic.

true

none

italic

I like the river of news style of feed reading, despite having once written an RSS reader that doesn't use that style.

But I'm not actually 100% sure what the technical definition is. I'm not trying to be obtuse about this -- I want to be sure I understand.

I think it's something like this, but I'm not sure which parts are optional, and I might be missing things.

1. It presents a list of articles from multiple feeds in a scrollable list.

Yes.

2. There might be multiple scrollable lists -- tabs of some kind.

Not required, but you can do it that way (I have it with my mediahackers site). But each one is a river, not the whole thing.

3. Items in the list are sorted in reverse-chronological order by arrival date (date the feed scanner saw the item) rather than by pubDate. (True?)

True. By arrival date. pubDate is not important for ordering.

4. Items are presented with title, link, and an excerpt. The excerpt should be just long enough to be meaningful (around 280 characters).

You could leave out the excerpt and it would still be a river. The important thing is that the excerpt be of determinate length, and short enough so you can see a lot of items on screen at the same time.

5. It handles edited items by ____? (I don't know. Does it show them again?)

Does not show edited items again.

6. There is no notion of read/unread whatsoever, and thus no unread counts.

Correct. No notion of read/unread.

7. There is no notion of starred (or flagged, or saved) items whatsoever. (Users can blog, send to a read-it-later service, etc. as they normally would for any web page.)

Not true -- you can do whatever you want there. I include a RT link on my items. Just as long as it's small and doesn't interfere with skimming.

8. A river of news feed scanner outputs river.js data. (Is this optional? Could it be RSS?)

Not required. It would however be useful to have a standard here. I want to write all my displayers in JS running in the browser.

9. Do river-of-news readers have to be web pages? Could an iOS or Mac app qualify, if it met all the criteria?

Of course it could be an IOS app.
The main idea aren't the details, but the way its used. I can scroll back to the point where I hit something I seen. Quickly. My memory is perfectly capable of telling me I've seen something before. You can rely on it, people can do this.

Scripting News: 11th hour for news nets.

Mon, 06 May 2013 16:58:18 GMT

Michael Wolff comments on the job ad that Twitter is running, looking for a manager of news.

He suggests existing news execs, and that's probably the kind of person Twitter is looking for for this job.

It's a head-fake. This guy is a figure-head. He or she will be working with media companies, speaking at conferences, talking about how Twitter is helping media companies succeed in the age of realtime Internet-delivered news. He or she is a feel-good ambassador to the news industry. A person handing out complementary samples of pasta and baked goods while the real action is elsewhere.

The job is a bedtime story. News will be as it always was, with familiar faces and jobs, just with a new delivery system.

Meanwhile, the news system of the future is booting up all around Twitter, which is and always has been a coral reef. They need a new shipwreck to build around, and this time the sunken ship is the remains of the news industry.

Even at this late hour, I have a recommendation to any player in the news industry.

1. Create a river of news and put it on your home page.

2. Include all the news from your own organization, but include news from bloggers in your community.

3. Include the feeds of your competitors.

4. Deliver the best news product you can with today's technology. You can link from the river to stuff behind your paywall, if you must, but the river itself must be freely accessible. Think of it as a river of ads for full-length stories.

5. No 140-char limit. Pick a higher number. There should still be a limit to the length of a synopsis. 500 characters is plenty. Most NYT synopses are much shorter than that.

6. Make nice with Twitter. You can do a head-fake too. :-)

Scripting News: Markdown and outliners.

Sat, 04 May 2013 21:10:19 GMT

I've had Markdown on my to-do list for a few months, and the other day, with a bit of blank space in my worklist, I decided to give it a shot.

It was amazingly easy to integrate into our JavaScript app. I just downloaded the source for Pagedown, the Markdown interpreter used by Stack Overflow. I put it into a file on our server, and included it in Fargo. Added a command to the File menu, and came up with a simple way to generate it for users. The whole thing was done in a couple of hours.

Now we need people who know Markdown and outliners to take a look at this, try it out and relatively quickly, before there's an installed base to break, figure out if there's anything special we need to do, because this is an outliner and not a straight text editor.

Here are a couple of considerations:

1. Should we generate one or two return chars at the end of every outline heading? At first we did one, then thought better and generated two, but now we're back at one. Pretty sure one is the right answer. We often think of a headline as a paragraph, but sometimes headlines are titles. Markdown views titles and paragraphs very differently.

2. Indentation. I thought at first that we should generate a tab for every level, but backed out of that idea quickly because Markdown treats tabs as very special characters. Everything deeper than level 0 would be seen as preformatted code. Not the desired outcome.

So I wonder if there have been any others who have integrated outlining and Markdown before? If so, what did they do here?

See the Fargo docs for an idea how it works from a user's standpoint.

I welcome any comments from Markdown experts (I am anything but that).

Scripting News: The Knicks as a metaphor.

Thu, 02 May 2013 16:52:06 GMT

A number of Knicks players did something extremely stupid when they dressed in black for last night's game, saying they were dressing for the Celtics' funeral. These guys may be talented athletes, but they don't understand sports. Amazingly. How could they get that far in the NBA without understanding that you don't celebrate until you win. I know they're young. I wonder if they've ever heard about Game 6 of the 1986 World Series.

Sports, if it teaches us anything, it's how to struggle against our folly. How not to tempt fate. How to manage our own presence.

Look at the incredible baskets these guys make. But they only make them when they're grounded, in the moment, feeling the energy, whatever it is. So JR Smith started celebrating after they had a solid lead in Game 3. He got ejected, and suspended, and not only wasn't there to help in Game 4, he broke the bubble around the Knicks, that had been around the team since they emerged from an awful funk in February. Now we have to wonder if they can get it back.

The Celtics, last night, walking off the court, may have helped the Knicks get back in the groove, repeating trash talk about Carmelo's wife. I'm just theorizing, lip-reading. But maybe he'll get angry and really want to win. That's probably all it takes.

Meanwhile in Oklahoma City, the Thunder coach thought he could sneak by the Rockets with a trick. Oh how sad. Kevin Durant who I thought was a true fighter, is instead mired in self-pity. And the Rockets, a young, smart, admirable -- wonderful group of young men -- are pushing every one of their buttons, artfully. They might pull out the upset. Amazing parallels between the Celtics and the Rockets. One team old, one young. Both not going out peacefully.

All this is a metaphor for my former friend Mike Arrington, who may be the JR Smith of tech. He was celebrating the demise of RSS while the body was still breathing. He had no clue that he had won, or that anyone was keeping score.

Technology isn't all that different from basketball. There's teamwork, and bubbles of energy, and franchises. RSS is not something that dies, any more than the NBA dies. Players come and go, there are generations -- the Patrick Ewing Knicks and the Bernard King Knicks. Now we have the Carmelo Anthony Knicks. But RSS, like the NBA is bigger than me or Mike. He doesn't get to say it's dead. RSS just laughs, shrugs it off and keeps on going.

Scripting News: The Fargo-WordPress connection.

Thu, 02 May 2013 15:29:26 GMT

My outliner is an authoring tool. I think of it as the hub of a wheel with lots of spokes. At the end of each spoke is a way to communicate.

Some of the spokes lead to private places, for example, the worknotes I share with my programming partner. No one else sees those. But then there are blog posts, like the one you're reading now. At the end of this spoke is software I wrote that renders an outline in this form. I'm one of a small number of people, today, using that method of rendering.

Yesterday we released a spoke that leads to WordPress, the popular open source blogging environment. You can now use Fargo to create and edit posts in WordPress. This works in two ways:

1. You can use the outliner to organize a library of posts you want to be able to access quickly.
2. You can use the outliner to structure each blog post.

By default each level is represented in the blog post by indentation. But we also add CSS styles to each paragraph that indicate what level they are at. So a skilled CSS designer can set it up so that level indentation does much more to control the appearance of the text. I expect lots of interesting stuff to develop here.

Here are the docs for the feature, and a list of recent new posts written in Fargo.

Here's a homemade video demo of the new Fargo-WordPress connection.

Over time you'll see us add more connection, and of course offer a general way for anyone to add new spokes to the wheel. And because we're using an open format, it'll even be possible to hook other outliners up to the same connections.

For anyone who cares, this is how you bootstrap a new standard, a coral reef for authoring and rendering.

PS: This is what the post looks like in WordPress. :-)

Scripting News: A song I sing to users.

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:34:29 GMT

When users ask when a feature will be available, this is what I say.

Software takes time. Good software takes even more time. We know that so we don't make promises about when software is coming. It'll be here when it's ready.

Scripting News: Google Glass is not a trivial product.

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:25:12 GMT

Watching this Chris Dixon interview this morning helped me appreciate that Google Glass has real-world non-trivial applications.

Examples:

1. A teacher giving a lecture while drawing a diagram on whiteboard.

2. As a teleprompter for a person giving a speech.

3. A doctor reviewing test results while examining a patient.

4. An architect looking at designs on a site visit.

5. Watching your heart rate while riding a bike.

6. Sign-language interpreter for a real-time meeting.

7. In general, as a heads-up display for jobs that require use of your hands and access to information, at the same time.

Honestly, I had not thought of these applications until Dixon explained.

And of course there are trivial applications, like watching Green Acres while pretending to pay attention to someone talking. ;-)

Sunday morning thoughts on outliners and word processors.

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 12:52:53 GMT

I was writing a comment in response to a comment from Hanan Cohen, and decided to make it a post. It was getting so long, and said stuff that I wanted to say more prominently.

Hanan said that Word had outlining in the late 80s, and they never took it out. So we should look out for users of that outliner as people who might like Fargo. But I don't look for any magic there, because their idea of outlining and ours are not the same thing.

It's like the word unconference. It was a term we came up with for BloggerCon, and then was applied to a very different kind of conference and the result was confusion. That's what outlining in word processors was, from my point of view, confusion.

What they called outlining was more like outline formatting. Putting Roman numerals on the top sections, capital letters on the first level. Numbers on the second and so on.

Word is a word processor. Its primary function is writing-for-printing. The choices the designers made make it a relatively strong formatter and a weak organizer.

Conversely, we can put formatting capabilities into an outliner, but it would behave like an outliner, not a word processor. We fully explored this with MORE, the users loved it, but they still needed to export to Word or Pagemaker if print formatting was important.

Word is a production tool -- good for annual reports, formal papers, stories, books. Fargo is an organizing tool, good for lists, project plans, narrating your work, presentations, team communication. You could organize a conference with an outliner. The slides would naturally be composed wiht an outliner.

An outliner is designed for editing structure more than it is for editing text. The text is sort of "along for the ride." Or you could see an outliner as text-on-rails. Outliner text is always ready to move, with a single mouse gesture or keystroke. You enter text into an outliner so you can move it around, like stick-up notes on a whiteboard.

The reason a program has to be either a word processor or an outliner is this: There's only one keyboard, and one set of mouse gestures. The identity of a product is determined by choices made by the designer. Word processors are good at selecting words, sentences and paragraphs. Outliners select headlines and all their subs. Shift-click in the two apps do vastly different things, yet in both cases they are "extending the selection." Even the data structures used by the programs are different. Yet superficially they look similar.

Some great software designers were fooled by this in the first go-around. Probably the guys who did Word thought at first that they were equalling our outliner, but I guess over time they realized what we learned too. That you need to know what your product is supposed to do before you make those choices. Otherwise it ends up as a confusing unusable mess. That's why Lotus 1-2-3 was a magical product, and Symphony, that confronted this problem head-on and didn't solve it (because it doesn't have a solution) never had 1-2-3's balance and sharp-edge feel. Symphony was mush, 1-2-3 was fine.

Apple's iTunes is another good example. It's all over the map, doing a dozen different things, without a single idea tying it all together. You can tell that the designers are confused too, because in each rev the commands move around and are re-named. Things you depend on disappear, but if you know the magic formula you can make them reappear. One senses that it might be possible to do a beautiful music app that felt wonderful, but if Apple were to produce one, they'd have to start over.

People who used an outliner were never satisfied with what the word processors called outlining. Ultimately that's how you tell what you got. When you sit a person down in front of the keyboard, does magic happen?

BTW, this is great. When I was selling outliners in the 80s there were no blogs, so I couldn't comment on how the various categories of software were handled by reviewers. Now the conversation can be multi-dimensional and lots of learning can happen quickly. Hope! :-)